Agata Bogacka: Interactionship

Edel Assanti is pleased to present _Interactionship_ – an exhibition of recent paintings by Agata Bogacka, her second with the gallery. Directly responding to rapidly shifting political climates in her native Poland and in the world at large, these precisely rendered paintings and their distinctive formal language of gradients and convergences reflect the instability and uncertainty of our times. Bogacka's work is concerned with systems of power, relationships, and resistance, articulated through an abstract language of colour, void and surface. Shapes and fields of colour are carefully kept apart; elsewhere, their edges meet briefly, their intersections resisting stability through subtle modulations of density, tone and luminosity. For Bogacka, working with gradients is a way of depicting ongoing processes and transformations in difficult times, interrogating mechanisms of power and oppression. Abstraction facilitates her ability to address these problems in the widest possible sense, encompassing their complexities and their nuances. Colour appears in flashes and then fades away, and areas of canvas are deliberately left bare. Broad swipes and brushstrokes at once allude to discord and function as gesture itself. The contrast between rough surface and thin layers of highly fluid paint create a dialogic where the transition between these two states is charged and politicised; in this configuration, raw canvas signifies withdrawal and the avoidance of action. Staging moments of dialogue, negotiation, and conflict, these works make visible the structural dynamics that underpin all human relationships, at all levels, from intimate connections between individuals through to sociopolitical systems shaped by power. "Despite their different scales, the nature of these relationships remains the same: they are based on inequality, domination, dependency, and often illusion," says Bogacka.